


you, the one i left behind

by ronsenboobi (snewvilliurs)



Series: blood-thirsting carrion birds (and other stories) [4]
Category: Final Fantasy XIV
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Deleted Scenes, Emotional Baggage, Emotionally Repressed Ala Mhigans, F/F, Femslash February, Mild Sexual Content, Patch 4.0: Stormblood Spoilers, Post-Revolution, Pre-Canon, Specific Warrior of Light (Final Fantasy XIV)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-13
Updated: 2021-02-13
Packaged: 2021-03-12 16:54:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,887
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29388018
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/snewvilliurs/pseuds/ronsenboobi
Summary: of being with the right person at the wrong time, and finding them again at the right time -- and coming to accept that they no longer are the right person.Whatever she had left behind in the woods with their son, it was not love of a man.Her love was in the highlands. Her love was dead, perhaps. Her love was between the pages of a book, pressed in colours and in wait of a homecoming.
Relationships: Original Female Character/Original Female Character, Warrior of Light (Final Fantasy XIV)/Original Female Character(s)
Series: blood-thirsting carrion birds (and other stories) [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1938766
Kudos: 2





	1. ALA MHIGO, 1556 ― THANALAN, 1558

**Author's Note:**

> title from "flowers" by anaïs mitchell.
> 
> this is another extra/deleted scene from the writing of my story [blood-thirsting carrion birds](https://archiveofourown.org/works/24665125), an au where ilberd survives baelsar's wall. i've been working on stuff about my wol morgana's first love, saskia, for a good while; this is a snapshot into their relationship before the occupation, after their separation, and after the liberation. 
> 
> enjoy, and happy galpalentine's day! i made myself sad!

On the hottest summer day Ala Mhigo had seen in half a decade, the sultry wind coming through the window barely pushed at the drapes in Saskia’s bedroom. They were thin, wispy things; she always insisted that the entire street could not, in fact, catch an eyeful inside if they so much as glanced up at her window, but Morgana sincerely doubted it. Convincing Saskia to push her bed against the wall and past the window had been the greatest of her small victories.

It was a southwesterly, she thought blankly as the breeze sludged over her bare skin. Saskia was pale as a sunset sky against her, her cheeks barely tinged pink—she was bafflingly unaffected by the heat, but her body was no less a bed of coals at the contact.

“Get away from me,” Morgana moaned miserably, forcing a shudder down her spine that still wouldn’t bring a chill with it.

Her hand tightened around the fine bones of Saskia’s wrist.

“I’m almost done,” Saskia said, focused and determined.

She kissed Morgana’s neck, tendons taut under her clammy skin as she turned her head away, and listened to the hitch in her breath. Curled her fingers with the press of her palm.

Morgana loosed a strangled cry, half a curse, as her whole body tensed in a halting shudder. It was a beautiful thing to watch her unravel: the lines of her muscles hardening, every part of her gently coming apart in her abandon. Saskia always wanted to hold her, to kiss her and keep her in that moment for as long as her body would remain inside it—after everything it had taken for Morgana to trust her heart with intimacy, it was only right to cherish every breath of it.

But the skin of her forearm clung to Morgana’s thigh as she moved it away. The holding would have to wait for a cooler day.

Morgana lay boneless and panting on the bed, her belly fluttering below her ribs as Saskia reached over her to wipe her hands clean on the wet—once cool—towel at the edge of the washbasin.

“Put it on my cunt before it catches fire,” Morgana mumbled. “I’m so bloody sticky.”

Saskia laughed, but obliged her. As she lay back down beside her, propping her head up on her hand, Morgana lifted two fingers to brush along the edge of Saskia’s jaw to kiss her, slow and deep.

They broke apart at a burst of noise echoing on the stone of the street below. Saskia slid down to the foot of her bed and peered out from behind the curtains.

“What is it?” Morgana asked. She made an attempt to sit up, but only got as far as leaning up on her elbows.

“It’s hard to— oh, Rhalgr’s tits,” Saskia said, bringing her fingers up to her lips. “King’s men. They’re dragging a woman out of the inn.”

The heat-soaked weight on Morgana's body dissipated; she was beside Saskia in an instant, feeling as though her ribs were sinking down. “Who?”

“I’ve never seen her before,” Saskia said. She turned her face away from the window as one of the kingsguard grabbed a fistful of the woman’s hair to force her to follow.

“—woman is a traitor,” said another kingsguard, his voice half-buried under the woman’s cries and the clamour rising on the street. His blade flashed in the sun, forcing onlookers away. “—to be brought to the royal palace— conspiring against the throne.”

Morgana scoffed. “‘Conspiring against the throne’ has so many convenient uses these days,” she said darkly. Her fingers itched for her sword, but what could she do? Clamber downstairs and onto the street, naked as the day she was born, to butcher the king’s men for a woman she didn’t know? They’d find out where she’d come from; they always did. And they’d find Saskia.

Every day her company played with fire with the plays they put on of late; the king burned through his people, but his madness did not make him deaf. If they shouted about the failed dynast-kings of eld from the stage loudly enough, it wouldn’t matter that their ingenue was the daughter of a diplomat. It wouldn’t matter that their bastard director was old money and promised a contingency plan should Theodoric take notice.

Morgana knew violence. The reign of a madman who burned every monk in the country alive in their temple and hung his own relatives from the city walls came to an end with a few inches of good steel; not with politics, and certainly not with a recital of some patriotic monologues to appease him.

And since she was not about to storm the palace to drive a blade into Theodoric’s heart—not today, at the very least—she gently wrapped her fingers around Saskia’s wrist and tugged her away from the window.

“It isn’t right,” Saskia said, anger and frustration knotting around her heavy heart.

“We don’t know for certain that it isn’t.”

Morgana didn’t really believe that, but it was a possibility. Despite the heat, she lay back down and pulled Saskia against her, pressing a kiss to her hair as they both sighed.

“No king lives forever,” Morgana added. She traced a finger down the damp line of Saskia’s spine, taking her thoughts past the window and into something else. “If it gets bad, we’ll just leave.”

Saskia shifted in her arms; she pushed herself up onto an elbow and looked down at Morgana with a rueful expression. “I can’t just leave. My parents—”

“I think Freyja knows better than anyone how to leave a place behind to survive. And Avis would follow her to the ends of the earth,” Morgana said smartly. “Besides, it wouldn’t be forever. It’s a last resort.”

“I’m sorry, mistress,” Saskia said, poking Morgana’s shoulder twice, “who are you and what have you done with my hunk of rock woman? I’ve never known her to plan ahead.”

Morgana caught her finger and kissed the tip. “I’m an auntie now; I just want to keep my family safe. Better to see a bit of this world than to end up drowned in Loch Seld by one of the king’s dogs.”

All Saskia could do was hum in some manner of agreement, her discomfort with the possibility palpable. She shifted again, wriggling until her ear was pressed against Morgana’s chest, and spoke so quietly that her breath brushing Morgana’s skin seemed louder than her words.

“Where would you go? To see the world.”

“Now that’s thinking much too far ahead,” Morgana said. She shrugged one shoulder, careful not to disturb Saskia on the other. “Gridania to start with, I suppose. I’m sure those prissy Elezen could use a proper sellsword to do some real knocking-‘round of heads.”

Saskia settled into the fable with her, turning it into something far more real—women like Morgana did not have much of an imagination. “Acting in that amphitheatre of theirs under the open sky? I could do that,” she said thoughtfully, then pushed herself up onto an elbow, head cradled in her palm, to look down at Morgana. “Would you help me find flowers?”

“What for?” Morgana said with a chuckle, for surely Saskia already knew the answer.

“Fertile land. Must make for beautiful native species.”

A pale, wispy lock of hair escaped from behind Saskia’s ear as she tilted her head thoughtfully, tickling Morgana’s collarbone like a kiss. She reached out to tuck it back and trailed her fingers along Saskia’s jaw.

“Did you know,” Saskia said in that sweet, dreaming tone of hers, “there’s this flower from Nhalmasque—sylleblossom. Freyja’s favourite, and naturally, not found anywhere outside the mountains of Ilsabard. When she left, she kept a single sylleblossom pressed in a notebook, and it was the only thing she could salvage when the Queensglaive got her away from the imperials. And still, she gave it to Avis when she thought the queen was going to marry her off to some nephew of hers or some such. That was when Avis decided to steal her.”

Morgana hummed, and thought of the whitish blue flower she’d seen in Saskia’s mothers’ home once—she remembered thinking that it looked like the snapdragons that grew in the Peaks, if the snapdragons lived long enough through the winter to go pale with frost. “They have it framed over the hearth, don’t they?”

Saskia opened her mouth and closed it. Smiled. “You’ve noticed,” she said fondly.

It was the first time Morgana had peered inside a home where two beloved lived; the first time she’d realized that what she felt for Saskia was right, and that it didn’t have to feel like walking on thorns. Of course she had noticed.

“Well, it’s settled,” she said, nudging Saskia’s chin to stop her from giving her that look from the depths of her pale blue eyes. “When we go to Gridania, and then wherever else we end up, we’ll save all the flowers to put in our house when we return here.”

Morgana had been living nearly a year in Thanalan when she first took notice of the desert lilies.

She could not pinpoint the exact moment she had stopped looking; it had been a small thing wasting away, cradled somewhere behind her ribs without light to touch it. In the Shroud, she could make herself believe that this new life was temporary, and her feverish hours in the days after claws had torn her throat open were a haze filled with flowers.

And Nimaurel had known all their names, their purpose in the forest, the things he could make of their stems and leaves and roots. He had been gentle and kind, just like Saskia, and Morgana had been a broken fool finding comfort in the arms of someone who could give it. Whatever she had left behind in the woods with their son, it was not love of a man.

Her love was in the highlands. Her love was dead, perhaps. Her love was between the pages of a book, pressed in colours and in wait of a homecoming.

But the desert was no place for it, and the book lay forgotten at the bottom of Morgana’s pack—until the desert lilies. They were tucked at the bottom of a burning cliff, scrabbling the edges of a dry wash; things not meant to survive, but that still did. Clinging to something unseen and unreachable, like her.

Her first impulse, violent for reasons she did not understand, was to tear out the flowers at the root and let them rot; but when she knelt, the soft petals under her fingers felt so much like the memory of Saskia’s pale skin that it ached.

Morgana picked the smallest of the bunch, barely looking at it once it was in her hand, and carried it home—“home,” she always thought with gritted teeth, the word sharp with emptiness—back to the gloom of the caves. There she sought out her little notebook, and pressed the lily between the pages as she had dozens of others from the Shroud to the desert.

When this was done, Morgana knew it would be the last page she filled.

She had a craftsman carve her a box out of stone with what little coin she had to spare, just big enough to house the notebook and latch closed. And when the moon was high in the sky, she buried the box in the desert, until such time as she could carry it where it would truly be home.

Even after so many years, she still remembered where it lay, unchanged as a grave.


	2. ALA MHIGO, PRESENT DAY

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this scene takes place immediately after the end of [chapter 18](https://archiveofourown.org/works/24665125/chapters/63245356) from _blood-thirsting carrion birds_.
> 
> content warning: brief mentions of abuse in dialogue.

When she appeared haloed in white-gold light in the doorway of Morgana’s room in the palace infirmary, Saskia seemed to have brought the sun with her—not the blazing, warm sun that shone down on the lochs at midday, but rather the light that made every brick and tile in the city take on a deep coppery glow when it dipped below the horizon. The same sort of light that poured into the Hall of the Griffin, washing the tiles and the statues in gold.

How many council meetings had she missed, by now? Who stood at Raubahn’s side?

Saskia’s presence swept the questions away before they had even fully taken shape, for she brought the past with her. For a moment, Morgana could almost believe that Theodoric still sat the throne, wading in blood up to his ankles; that she was some fool mercenary while Saskia duly played the role of the sweet ingénue visiting her wounded lover.

A pretty enough picture, if not for the ugly backdrop, and for the fact that it faded away in instants. The now squeezed itself around the past, and memory was a thick and festering thing. Morgana, for the umpteenth time that day, had to tamp down the impulse to reach under her bandages and scratch at the ugly slash the poisoned blade had left on her arm.

“May I come in?” Saskia asked. She’d never shed the gentle diplomacy her white-star mother had handed down to her, for lack of a title and royal blood worth more than being the Empire’s plaything.

“You’ll never have to ask that for as long as I’m alive,” Morgana said. She shifted to straighten herself up on the pillows wedged behind her back—a sorry feat, given the fresh wound on her right arm and the tapestry of burns weakening her left.

Saskia was at her side in instants to help her and adjust the pillows. There was a thin strip of black velvet resting snugly below her throat, Morgana realized as she leaned over her, bearing a glimmering charm with a small chunk of obsidian set at its heart. It was the darkest thing Morgana had ever seen her wear, and she couldn’t put her finger on why it felt familiar until—

“Neesa told me what happened.”

Neesa. She’d worn the same around her own neck.

“I imagine she was disappointed I made it out of there,” Morgana said. She spoke only in bad faith, she knew, but the bitterness slipped through her before she could even notice its presence.

Saskia gave her a look that ached for how intimate it was: the knowing, silent reprimand—never angry or judging—that could soften Morgana without a word. She’d been a much less combative woman, back then, and terribly in love. Still, it worked. 

Perhaps Raubahn might appreciate a lesson in exercising Saskia’s talents.

“Fine,” Morgana said, leaning back against the pillows as Saskia sat down at her bedside. “She helped save my life. But I’m not going to act like she isn’t an acquired taste.”

“So are you, Mora,” Saskia said lightly.

Morgana huffed. “I— _Fine._ I’m a bastard. It’s been twenty years; haven’t we got anything new to talk about?”

“How are you feeling?”

“Both my arms are useless—only the one temporarily—and the poison still has me so addled I can barely walk straight. I feel like a million gil,” Morgana said dryly.

“You’ll make it through. You always have.”

Rather than look at Saskia’s face as she spoke, Morgana let her gaze fall to Saskia’s hands: they were folded neatly in her lap, her long fingers bare. She’d always worn a collection of slender rings that she only ever removed for the stage—when had they come off for good?

“I’m starting to dread the day where I won’t,” Morgana admitted, keeping her tone as blank as she could. “It’s coming. I know it is.”

“But it hasn’t yet,” Saskia said gently. “So don’t fret, my love.”

Emotion closed around Morgana’s throat like a noose; a part of her wanted to reach through the past and feel Saskia’s sweet lips on her brow, her cheeks, her lips. She wanted all the things she’d lost. She wanted Saskia to call her _love_ in earnest—not like some overly familiar matron from the merchant district.

And as she wanted all these things, the past felt more and more out of reach, and cold in the distance. Like a pining fool, she wanted Raubahn beside her, warm and solid; not an echo of something lost, but something she chose now. As though the simple fact of his standing near might lessen the tide longing that washed over her, or at the very least, keep her head above water.

Saskia reached out to pat her hand, her fingers curling briefly under Morgana’s thumb—whether a gesture of lingering intimacy or simply kindness, it was perfectly warm, and it made Morgana ache.

“I’m glad you’re all right, Mora.”

Morgana ignored the lance of pain that sliced through the cut in her arm to raise Saskia’s hand to her lips, pressing a kiss to Saskia’s skin for the first time in twenty years. And the last, perhaps, but she had no mind for the threat of finality creeping into this moment. Not now.

“I’m glad you’re here to say it,” she said, tracing her thumb over a pale scar on the side of Saskia’s pinky finger. “I never did give you proper thanks for the theatre. I’m grateful—for your help and your discretion both.” 

Saskia smiled. Her fingers slipped out of Morgana’s grasp as she leaned back in her chair again, smoothing the hem of her open-front tunic where it fell in her lap. “I ran into that… former guest of yours outside. It’s good to see him well, too.”

Whatever Morgana almost retorted on instinct died before she could give it voice. Her mouth opened, then closed. She frowned.

“What do you mean, you ran into him?”

“He’s been standing guard outside your room. Well, sitting,” Saskia said. She looked briefly perplexed. “Neesa said he wouldn’t leave when they brought you here. Did you not know he was there all this time?”

“No one bloody told me,” she muttered, thinking back to Raubahn’s last visit—and his complete failure to mention that Ilberd had been hanging around her sickroom like some clingy ghost.

“Regardless—I’m glad you were merciful to him, after all.”

Morgana did not bother to tell her she might feel differently if she knew exactly who he was and what he’d done; in truth, it was unnecessary. Saskia had not been a spy for the better part of two decades to stop listening for the things that went on between closed doors; the Griffin was too well-known and his actions too divisive for his return to a measure of a life not to make waves.

She knew, and she did not care. But how could Morgana imagine this? Saskia did not fault her for the rigidity of her outlook.

She merely went on, wearing a carefully prodding smile. “He seems to care about you a great deal, in his own way.”

“He owes me a debt that he can well spend the rest of his miserable life trying to repay, and he knows it,” Morgana said with a bitter scoff. “Trust me, Saskia: his heart has died long before I ever met him.”

Saskia made a noise in the back of her throat that Morgana couldn’t understand. Derision? Disappointment? She found no explanation for either.

“I suppose I was hoping,” Saskia said, leaning forward to prop her elbow on her knee and rest her chin in her palm, “that you had someone of your own. As I do Neesa.”

It was pointless and selfish, how Morgana’s heart tightened at the mention of Neesa’s name. She looked away, picking at a loose thread in the woven blanket in her lap.

“I do have someone.” Licking her lips, she glanced at the closed door as if someone might manifest to listen to every word of their conversation. There was no need to say this, to let the intimate details of her life reach yet another person’s ears, but she once would have told Saskia every secret that lay inside her and trusted her with all of them. She could trust her with this. “Raubahn. Commander Aldynn.”

Saskia raised her eyebrows, considering.

“He is good to you, I hope,” she said with a firmness Morgana recognized for how it mirrored her own feelings towards Neesa.

Morgana almost laughed. “Better than I deserve.”

“Morgana,” said Saskia seriously, and it almost felt wrong to hear her whole name in her mouth. “Do you know how many women I’ve heard speak like this of the imperials they took into their beds to ensure their own survival? How many times it was something _they_ had brutalized these women into needing to believe?”

A knot tightened inside Morgana’s belly, stealing away her breath as though she had been punched. When she could speak again, her voice was small and strained.

“I don’t…” she said, and licked her lips again. “Did you have to…?”

“We all did whatever we could to survive, Mora. Us in here, and you out there.” Saskia’s gaze fell down to her hands, her expression like an overcast sky. “I’m sorry. I am aware those words don’t always mean… But I need to know that this man—”

“Is the kindest, noblest, most honourable man I have ever known,” Morgana said in one breath. “I say this because I barely deserved you then, and that was before I became… gnarled and spiteful. And now… I’m not nearly as good to him as he is to me.”

Saskia’s eyes were soft as she looked at Morgana. “You deserved me. Your stout heart always has.”

“That from one of your old damsel in distress plays?” Morgana asked with a weak smile. She had to bite into her cheek to keep her lip from quivering, and swallowed hard to keep her voice from dying in her throat.

“Even if it was, it is the truth,” Saskia said with a smile, laying her hand over Morgana’s once more.

Morgana considered the bandages wrapped around her arms, the white lines of old scars on her skin, stark against Saskia’s pale hand; the weight of their years was written into every new mark. Saskia’s veins were a starker blue than they once had been.

Time. Too much, and too little.

“Saskia,” she said softly, not daring to look her in the face. “If not for Neesa, and Raubahn, and the love we have for them—do you think there could ever be something again? For us?”

The smile Saskia gave her then broke Morgana’s heart anew as she shook her head, the thin tassels of her earrings brushing her jaw.

Morgana nodded. “Yeah. I shouldn’t have asked. I’m sorry.”

“I would have if you hadn’t,” Saskia said quietly. She rose to her feet, brushing her thumb over Morgana’s brow before bending to kiss the crown of her head. “You should rest, Mora. We’ll see each other soon.”

It didn’t feel like it could be true, but Morgana nodded nonetheless. She watched Saskia begin to walk away from the bed, and then, when Saskia’s hand was on the doorknob, she found herself speaking.

“I’ve a book of flowers I pressed for you, after we… after. It’s still in Thanalan. Would you like to see it?”

“Yes,” Saskia answered—gently, but without any hint of hesitation. “Yes, I should like that very much.”

**Author's Note:**

> thanks for reading! 💚 drop me a line if you'd like, and you can also follow me on [twitter](https://twitter.com/vulpinewood) where i [sarah paulson under table.jpeg]


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